


Little Bird

by FarAwayInWonderland



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Introspection, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 20:43:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17988203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FarAwayInWonderland/pseuds/FarAwayInWonderland
Summary: Magnus' mother had been the most important person in his life.Until he met Alec Lightwood.





	Little Bird

**Author's Note:**

> I discovered that someone posted my favourite musical from 1993 on YouTube which was one of the most defining pieces of media during my childhood. One song especially stuck with me as I became older: It is about growing up and slowly losing the child you were to the adult you're becoming; about trying to hold on to that child - to that innocene - until one day you realise that it's already too late because you can no longer feel it. It inspired me to write this fic, which is more of a introspection with little in the way of plot. I just had a lot of thoughts that I needed to let out. 
> 
> Translation of the lyrics in the notes at the end. [Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oykEPNoMiyU) the song (it's in German, though).

_»Ich_ _wollte_ _nie_ _erwachsen_ _sein,_    
_Hab_ _’_ _immer_ _mich_ _zur_ _Wehr_ _gesetzt_ _.«_

Magnus’ mother had been everything to him. 

One would think that when he thought about her, the image that would come to his mind would be of her last moment, of her hanging from one of the beams in their barn at the edge of the rainforest. That his mind would conjure her empty eyes, devoid of the spark that had made her who she was; a mouth slightly agape as if she had died with a deep sigh escaping her lips. The wind playing with her hair, even as the rest of her body was as frozen as her gaze.

Some would assume that thinking about his mother meant thinking about death. That remembering his mother meant remembering destruction and despair. 

They were wrong. 

When Magnus closed his eyes and thought about his mother it wasn’t those images that sprung to his mind. 

There were birds chirping in the background. A symphony of sounds that covered the whole area and seemed to go on forever and forever, as if Mother Nature wanted to assure him that he wasn’t alone, that – no matter where he was – she and her creatures would watch over him. A slight breeze would waft over the fields where the village grew their food, play with the leaves of the trees and make them dance to a tune only it was privy to. With the wind would come the smell of eucalyptus from the nearby forest, of smoke from the various firepits in the nearby village and of salt that it sometimes brought from the ocean, even though it was more than a day's travel away. Sometimes Magnus imagined that if he listened  closely  he could hear the waves in the wind, crashing against the shores. 

He was watching the boys from the village play from his elevated viewpoint and frowned. 

“What has your guts in a twist, my little bird?” 

Magnus turned around to see his mother walk up to him. To Magnus’ six-years-old eyes she was the most striking person he had ever seen. Her pitch-black hair poured over her shoulder like the classiest silk and her brown eyes shone warm, both from the sunlight reflecting from it and the inner light that came from herself. 

Her hands were those of a person who knew hard work: rough, broken nails and sometimes covered with earth when she came back from the fields, and yet to Magnus those were the hands that showed him love. They pressed him against his mother’s chest and ran through his hair when he needed the assurance of companionship after a nightmare. They wiped away his tears when the others were bullying him again for the colour of his eyes, that applied the paste made of herbs to his various scratches that came with being a young boy who was discovering the world around. 

To Magnus’ his mother’s hands were the most beautiful thing in the world. 

“I don’t want to become like them,” Magnus replied. He didn’t need to mention who he meant. His mother knew already. She always knew. “I don’t  wanna  grow up if it means that I’m  gonna  be like them.” 

“Oh, my little bird,” his mother sighed. Not in exasperation or in  annoyance  like many others would. There was  fondness  in it that couldn’t be expressed in words, but also a certain kind of heaviness that Magnus couldn’t quite fathom. 

Many centuries later, with children of his own, Magnus would finally understand her and how she had felt. The infinite love you felt towards them, the desire to protect them forever, to keep them close to your heart where no one could hurt them, but with it the heartbreak of knowing that no matter how vast your love it could not stop time as it set your children adrift bit by bit by bit, no matter how tightly you clung to them. 

“You’ll always be that, you know?” his mother continued. “My little bird. Beautiful, free, unburdened and the world at your feet. Nothing will ever change that.” 

“Nothing?” Magnus asked, his eyes wide. “Even if I grow up?” 

“Even if you grow up,” his mother assured him, running her hand through his hair. “My little bird.” 

And when Magnus whispered the same name to a sleeping  Max  he liked to imagine that his mother would look down on them and smile, because no matter how fate had separated them, he had once been her ‘Little Bird’ and always would be. 

_»_ _Von_ _außen_ _wurd_ _' ich hart_ _wie_ _Stein,_    
_Und_ _doch_ _hat man_ _mich_ _oft_ _verletzt_ _._ _«_

From his hidden viewpoint Magnus watched his mother’s funeral pyre. He watched as the flames work through the wood and lick at his mother’s corpse until they shot into the sky as if they were carrying her soul towards her finally resting place. 

He didn’t care what the other’s said: His mother wouldn’t go to Hell. She was – had been – too good for that, too pure. He had loved his mother and his mother had loved him and Magnus couldn’t believe that someone who had loved so fierce, so unconditionally, would go anywhere but Heaven. Her love had been like a deep river: calm, reassuring and endless and it hurt so much to think about how he would no longer have that love to fall back on. 

If the villagers discovered him, they would kill him. But that threat hadn’t managed to keep Magnus away. He deserved it to say his last good-byes to his mother; words that he hadn't been able to say when he had discovered her in the barn; thoughts that he hadn’t been able to articulate, too thrown off by the sudden turn of events. 

His mother had killed herself because of him. But that didn’t change that she had loved him once like no one else had, even as the memories were slowly tinted by melancholia as he stood there. She had brought him into this world and had raised him to be the person he was now and then she had left him. 

And now he had to fend for himself. As the smoke rose into the night sky, carrying with  it  small pieces of ember that shone in the darkness like a thousand fireflies, Magnus realised that he could no longer be the child that his mother had loved. That he had stopped being that child when he had turned into the monster that had driven his mother into taking her own life. 

He would always carry that child and those happy memories with him, but he could never turn back into it. He needed to become someone –  _ something _  – else and maybe one day he could release the memories without the bitter aftertastes. But now he would build his walls around him – impenetrable and sky high – to protect the good parts of him until one day maybe he could be cured. 

One day when his mother could love him again. 

_»_ _Irgendwo_ _tief_ _in_ _mir_ _bin ich_ _ein_ _Kind_ _geblieben_    
_Erst_ _dann_ _,_ _wenn_ _ich's_ _nicht_ _mehr_ _spüren_ _kann_    
_Weiß_ _ich, es_ _ist_ _für_ _mich_ _zu_ _spät_ _._ _«_

The faint light of the bustling city was shining through the windows of their bedroom and plunged it into a half-darkness. Time didn’t seem to exist in this half-state that was neither here and now nor there and then. Silence stretched through the room, but it was neither oppressive nor suffocating; no, rather it was an old companion that had come to visit and was pleased with what it found. Magnus knew it well, this silence, and he welcomed it. 

He watched Alexander, who was sleeping next to him, his breath even and his face bereft of any worrying lines that more often than Magnus liked marred it while his husband was awake. Even after all these years,  it  warmed  Magnus’  heart that Alexander allowed himself to be so unguarded around him, so unafraid, so trusting. 

It was such a rare gift, so precious, that Magnus’ breath hitched every time he just thought about it. He had spent centuries of his life with walls around him that he thought had been impenetrable and high as the sky, closed off from the rest of the world in a desperate attempt to protect the rest of the child he had been once. He had buried it deep inside him, along with the memories of his mother, under layers and layers of memories and facsimiles of himself that he became better at constructing with every passing year. 

The child he once was had been the only pure thing in his life, untainted by the horrors that came after his mother’s suicide and maybe by keeping it locked away, he had tried to keep her memories alive. Memories of a better time, memories of being loved unconditionally. During times when he felt like drowning, he had clung to them like a lifeline and often it had saved him from becoming the monster he had always feared. 

But he was no longer in need of saving, Magnus thought as he continued to gaze at Alexander like he was the most precious treasure in all of the world. And to Magnus he was; nothing could compare to the man lying next to him and the children they were raising. Alec had saved him as much as Alec claimed Magnus had saved him. They had saved each other. 

And so, maybe it was time to let go of the child. Let the past be the past and allow himself to be firmly rooted in the present, with Alec and their family. The walls were gone, as were the fields of his home, as was the tweeting of the birds. It only existed in Magnus’ mind, but he no longer needed those bittersweet memories, because he was creating better memories with every  second  he spent with Alec. 

He was finally home. 

And as he settled back into bed and slung his arm around his husband, there was a faint whisper in the silence – imaginary or real, Magnus didn’t care: 

_ “My little bird.” _

**Author's Note:**

> _Translation of the lyrics:_
> 
> I never wanted to grow up,  
> I always tried to resist it. 
> 
> I became as hard as stone,  
> And yet was often hurt by others. 
> 
> Somewhere deep inside I stayed a child,  
> Only when I can no longer feel it,  
> Do I finally know that it’s too late for me.


End file.
